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Descent into Madness - Avacyn Restored Spoiler

Descent into Madness



At the beginning of your upkeep, put a despair counter on Descent into Madness, then each player exiles X permanents he or she controls and/or cards from his or her hand, where X is the number of despair counters on Descent into Madness.

The stairs lead down in both directions.

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  • Randomer

    I let my op start so i win when he mills out…

    • Jp Luna

      Descent into Madness isn’t immune to its own effect, so eventually you’ll have to exile it (assuming you meant that the game would stalemate when the field and hands were empty). Be very, very careful if you’re considering playing this card.
      I’m not sure what to make of this card immediately. Clearly its impact is huge, but what sort of deck wants to run this? Mainly, what strategy will make it worth getting hit yourself?

      • Christoph

        Probably a BW token deck that runs Skirsdag High Priest– it’d be a good way to get Morbid every turn until it gets out of control, at which point you just let the enchantment die and swing with a handful of 5/5 demons. That’s the best application I can think of, though even that’s a bit iffy.

        • LOL

          need to kill creatures in order to get morbid. not exile.

  • Guest

    Some kind of token deck would run this, probably. And when you’re out of tokens, just exile this enchantment. I’m sure you’ve done more damage to a player who doesn’t have enough creatures than yourself.

  • BRONSON

    mmmhh… just like smokestack, please!! i dont want a stax deck in standard!

  • Wisdomseyes

    I am trying to understand the “and/or” from this cards text. It is not making sense, why would they give one an option to lose 2 sets of their cards?

    At first glance I thought “It’s in case they dont have cards in their hand” but… they wouldnt clarify that… its already in the core rules what happens if you need to.

    This seems like a fun rare though. Might be an off mythic that wins tournaments occasionally (going from past experiences with smallpox) Nothing special, but definitely not bad in any way when you build around it.

    • croket07

      It says and/or in case you want to exile one card from your hand and one permanent you control. Like a split option basically.

  • Dre

    @Wisdomeyes: the way I see it, the “X permanents he or she controls and/or cards from his or her hand” would mean the cards exiled must equal X and can come from either the battlefield or your hand. So, with 5 counters on Descent into Madness, a player with 5 permanents and 5 cards in hand can choose to either exile all the permanents, or 2 permanents and 3 cards from hand, or 1 permanent and 4 cards from hand, etc.

    Currently I don’t think there are any (or at least many) abilities that cause players to make up for X with a combination of cards from the battlefield and/or their hand.. So we can probably expect a change in the Oracle text sometime in the future for this rule. Many cards in the history of Magic have had minor alterations done to the text.

  • Sajomir

    Could you make this work with Griselbrand, I wonder?

    • nataku

      Yes, with grislebrand, attack and gain life and use that for more cards before your upkeep, you can exile your new cards or something on the field, but your opponent will eventualy have to exile their field, even avacyn is no match to exile.

  • Jacobcmagic

    its pretty bad, it gives your opponent to many choices

  • Seritho

    Yeah I am not seeing how this is supposed to work. Yes it can exile itself so I guess if your opponent had only a few cards in hand and you had a lot of tokens then you could really put the hurt on them and then just exile during your next upkeep. But it is still like setting off a black hole in the middle of the battlefield, everyone is going to get hurt bad. Hopefully someone smarter than I can see a good purpose for this outside of a token deck.